Terminally online right wing dorks are falling head over heels for an AI-generated waifu — and setting themselves up to get scammed in the process.
The damsel at the center of all their fawning is “Amelia,” who, we must stress, is not real. Nonetheless, she’s everywhere on places like X, where users ask Elon Musk’s AI Grok to imagine her as a purple-haired British schoolgirl — because of course she is — who’s also the anti-woke rebel of their dreams.
Often proudly displaying a Union Jack, Amelia does things like burn pictures of British PM Keir Starmer and rail against Islam and immigrants. She’s also been shown reading the notoriously racist book “The Turner Diaries” and proudly appearing alongside a sieg heiling comrade, flagrantly betraying white supremacist and neo-Nazi sympathies.
But where did “Amelia” come from? According to reporting from The Guardian, she was initially a spoof of a goth-looking character in a video game called “Pathways.” Funded by the UK government, the game was designed to be a classroom tool for teaching teenagers how to avoid falling into online extremism, but quickly became the target of mockery by far-right figures on social media.
The trend was heavily pushed by an anonymous right-wing account on X starting on January 9, according to an analysis by Peryton Intelligence shared with The Guardian. Since then, “Ameliaposting” has surged from 500 posts per day to over 10,000.
Of course, where there’s right wing outrage involved, there’s a grift. An account roleplaying as Amelia began pushing a new Amelia-branded cryptocurrency called $AMELIAJAK, which was retweeted, and thereby effectively endorsed, by Musk, The Guardian noted. (Musk, it’s worth mentioning, has a documented fondness for AI-generated women, with even his own followers mocking him for openly “gooning to AI anime.”) The meme coin reeks of a scam called a rug pull, in which followers are baited into buying the coin to boost its value, before the founder sells all their assets at a higher price. This causes its value to crash, leaving the duped fans with worthless currency.
Not all meme coins end up as being overt scams, but clearly someone intends to profit off of Amelia’s “fame.” And in any case, the coins’ value often collapses on their own, since they’re propped up by nothing except a fleeting moment of internet virality. Amelia may be out there owning the libs and destroying woke, but she’s also emptying the wallets of many far-right memelords who see her as the imaginary, wildly racist goth girlfriend that they never had — but wish they did.
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